After the update yesterday I got some clarity on the mechanics of the game (after screwing around for the first hour). With this revelation I also got the idea to try something drastic and new, the Defold game engine (http://www.defold.com/). I’ve heard people talking about it for a while and as I got into the beta the other week, I thought why not. I’ve been using Unity for 3 years and I’m very comfortable with it, it’s about time I try something new! Today’s experience has mostly been me trying to figure how stuff works and trying to get a grasp of the basics. Also been trying to get used to the Lua syntax, which is more of a challenge than one could imagine.

I was also inspired by my colleague Kenth (who’s also doing the challenge) to do a timelapse video. Took some time to set up but got it working eventually. It mostly consists of me fumbling around in the Defold editor, screwing up the Lua syntax (muscle memory semicolons…) and trying to figure out why stuff doesn’t work. I did however make some progress, doesn’t look like much at the moment but it’s something (movement and basic collision!).

(The gif was not suppose to be so dramatically slow, something happend when recording :))

Mostly been using the getting started tutorials as reference so far. I’m probably heading into deeper waters tomorrow, stay tuned!

Decided to take the December Gamedev Challenge as outlined here. Starting a day late and I’m not quite sure what I’m doing. I’ve got an idea for something and I’m going to try to get a playable prototype out of it, but it’s quite uncertain how it will turn out at the moment. Here’s a gif of current progress after 1 hour of just playing around with stuff.

For the longest time, the menu in BlastCat was in essence a programmer art placeholder. After finding some inspiration from other games, I had a solid idea on what to do. I was imagining a rotating planet showing different the different themes/worlds.

The very first iteration of the new menu. Note the curvature, it’s achieved by custom UI component that deforms an image by an AnimationCurve. Check here for another example of this component. It turns out that with actual graphics (not placeholder) the distortion actually looks like crap, in this case anyway. I’m sure I’ll find a good use for this component one day.

Here’s the final result. It uses essentially the same animation as as above, but somewhat snappier. Also the different background layers parallax slightly when transitioning. The gradient background is just a simple plane with the vertex colors lerped to transition between colors.